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Nearly 200 years after the French Revolution, the French worker remains tightly fettered near the bottom of a rigid social system, one that he has little hope of ever escaping. Adult education is virtually nonexistent in France, and though some companies offer evening courses for advancement, the training is almost always on the employee's own time. The room at the top of French life is restricted largely to those who were born there. A recent survey of 2,530 prominent French, ranging from Pop Singer Sylvie Vartan to Charles de Gaulle, showed that 68% came from families that belonged to the top 5% of French society. Only 5% of prominent French men and women came from what could be classified as the working class. Nor can the French worker reasonably hope that his offspring will inherit the chance for upward mobility that he was denied. For the vast majority of lower-class children, education ends at about 16, whereupon apprenticeship begins. Only 10% of French university students come from the working class, and many of those few fail to get through the maze of exams to the final degree so necessary for admission to the French Establishment.
Such narrow horizons shape the French workers' attitudes toward politics. Most workers are largely apolitical, openly cynical, and mistrustful of all shades of politicians and parties. The feeling is not entirely unjustified, since in the past France's established parties have indeed done little for the worker. Such support as the Communist party enjoys stems from the fact that the workers feel that the Communist labor unions have fought hardest for their economic gains. Furthermore, unlike bourgeois Frenchmen, the worker feels little or no fear about ultimate Communist intentions. "Even if they were to get the control," said one worker last week, "France wouldn't change very much. They would be moderates like the Czechs."
When the students first took to the barricades last month, the affair seemed as remote to the workers as almost everything else that happens in the "other Paris" of the bourgeois world. But as the violence grew, the workers—often ahead of their own union leaders-sensed an opportunity to turn the disorder to their own economic advantage, and the strikes and sit-ins began. From the discovery of their ability to bring the government to heel in money matters, it was only a short, logical step to the demand for worker power in political terms. But the evidence is that it was a step not taken by the great majority of French workers. Only a vocal few, in protest against their long history of being flattened to a single dimension by their unions as well as management and the government, demanded "direct democracy" and "participation" in factory affairs. They were sufficient in number to shout down Pompidou's wage increases. But they were not numerous enough to prevent the great bulk of French workers from wanting to go back to their workbenches, once it was clear that De Gaulle intended to stand firm. In that sense, the fundamental revolution of workers who are demanding genuine opportunity in French society still seems as far away as ever.